This is NOT that MVP Session

Slide 1

Slide 1 text

© 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This Is Not That MVP Session Nicolas David (He/Him) Senior Solutions Architect, Startups Saubia Khan (She/Her) Solutions Architect, Startups

Slide 2

Slide 2 text

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” Cindy Alvarez Lean Customer Development

Slide 3

Slide 3 text

Nicolas David Senior Solutions Architect, Startups Manama, Bahrain @nuage_ninja in/nicolasdavid Nicolas works hand in hand with technical co- founders, engineers and developers to help them make the most of the Cloud. He is at the crossroads of business and technology and engages with organizations at all stages of cloud adoption. Nicolas also takes a leading role in creating and presenting technical content and best practices.

Slide 4

Slide 4 text

Saubia Khan Solutions Architect, Startups Dubai, UAE in/saubia Saubia resides in the sunny city of Dubai and is a Startup Solutions Architect at AWS for the last 3 years. She passionately works with emerging startups in MENA & Turkey where she onboards and accelerates startups in the region with a focus on AI. Throughout her career she has focused on building innovative accessibility solutions with AI and has worked with AI startups where she helps them navigate the ever changing AI landscape.

Slide 5

Slide 5 text

• Building an MVP from the perspective of a technical founder • Personal experience and retrospective • Lessons learned from working with hundreds of early stage startups • What I would want to know starting fresh today • What to prioritize and what can be deferred • Tactical examples and first steps to get you started Our Focus Today

Slide 6

Slide 6 text

1. What is an MVP? 2. Before You Build 3. Leverage Frameworks 4. Flexible Architecture 5. Building Guardrails, Not Gates 6. Surviving the Unexpected 7. Understanding Your Users 8. Integrating Offline Tasks Agenda

Slide 7

Slide 7 text

What Is An MVP?

Slide 8

Slide 8 text

Minimum {X} Product Viable Usable Loveable Testable

Slide 9

Slide 9 text

”Left to Right” vs “Bottom to Top” Functionality Reliability Usability UX & Design

Slide 10

Slide 10 text

“If you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” Reid Hoffman Co-Founder LinkedIn

Slide 11

Slide 11 text

Product Iteration

Slide 12

Slide 12 text

Optimize For Learning Learn Prototype Experiment

Slide 13

Slide 13 text

The Learn-Build-Learn Cycle Learn Build

Slide 14

Slide 14 text

Where are you in your MVP journey today?

Slide 15

Slide 15 text

Before You Build

Slide 16

Slide 16 text

Are You Ready To Build an MVP? Problem Definition A clear understanding of the problem you are solving will ease communication of your idea with both stakeholders and users. Problem Metrics The number of people that have this problem, and the impact of the problem to those users. Solution Hypothesis Initial hypothesis of how the problem will be solved for your users.

Slide 17

Slide 17 text

• Process not product • Speed is paramount • Set the right focus (10-100 customers) • Customer feedback is critical • Expect to change/pivot/adapt • Weigh technical debt vs other kinds of debt MVP Is a State of Mind

Slide 18

Slide 18 text

• Focus on building and validating the strongest use case first • In most cases any building should take < 3 person months • Distinguish between being busy and creating value • Minimize friction wherever possible for your users MVP Feature Prioritization & Scope

Slide 19

Slide 19 text

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Airman's Odyssey

Slide 20

Slide 20 text

Leverage Frameworks

Slide 21

Slide 21 text

Ask yourself some important questions: • What are you building? • What are you optimizing for? • What are your existing skill sets? What skill sets are available to you in the market? What Architecture Is Right For Me?

Slide 22

Slide 22 text

• The monolith is a viable option • Leverage frameworks to increase your speed and confidence • Very little of what you build in your MVP will be recognizable a year later • Whatever you choose: leverage infrastructure as code! What Architecture Is Right For Me?

Slide 23

Slide 23 text

The Code Continuum Consider where no code, and low code solutions fit in Abstraction vs flexibility tradeoffs

Slide 24

Slide 24 text

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that can be used together or on their own, to help front-end web and mobile developers build scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS. • Configure and deploy backends quickly • Seamlessly connect frontends • Streamlined deployment of frontends • Easily manage your users and content AWS Amplify

Slide 25

Slide 25 text

AWS Copilot is a command line interface (CLI) that enables customers to quickly launch and easily manage containerized applications on AWS. • Architecture, not infrastructure • Simple and powerful config • Develop/Release/Operate AWS Copilot

Slide 26

Slide 26 text

The AWS Solutions Library offers a collection of cloud-based solutions for dozens of technical and business problems, vetted for you by AWS. • Automatically deploys directly into your AWS account • Library of AWS-vetted architecture diagrams AWS Solutions Library

Slide 27

Slide 27 text

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. • Easier cloud onboarding • Faster development process • Customizable and shareable • No context switching AWS Cloud Development Kit

Slide 28

Slide 28 text

AWS Solutions Constructs are vetted architecture patterns, available as an open-source extension of the AWS Cloud Development Kit, that can be easily assembled to create a production-ready workload. • Infrastructure-as-code • Pre-built, well-architected multi-service patterns • Combine to create your own solutions • Speed up your development cycle • Consistently deliver Well-Architected apps AWS Solutions Constructs

Slide 29

Slide 29 text

CodeWhisperer is trained on billions of lines of code and can generate code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in real time based on your comments and existing code. Bypass time-consuming coding tasks and accelerate building with unfamiliar APIs. • Focus on innovation and business-critical problems • Accelerate time-consuming development tasks & time to market • Quickly adopt new technologies to build complex solutions • Adopt AWS services more easily and with confidence • Improve application security AWS CodeWhisperer

Slide 30

Slide 30 text

AWS Marketplace makes buying software easy, it is transforming how customers worldwide find, subscribe to, deploy, and govern third-party software, data, containers, ML models, and professional services • Software and data you know, love, and trust • Broad selection for app portfolio modernization • Enhance governance and control • Incorporate professional support and expertise • Help optimize IT spend AWS Marketplace

Slide 31

Slide 31 text

AWS Marketplace makes selling software easy, you manage your product listings with minimal time and effort, gain insights on your cloud business, create and target offers to specific customer accounts along with Standard or Enterprise contracts. • Got to market faster • Sell the way your customers want to buy • Grow your customer base • Improve efficiency and profitability • Easy and secure deployment, almost instantly • Consolidated billing from AWS Sell on AWS Marketplace

Slide 32

Slide 32 text

For those of you that are building today, what frameworks are you using, if any?

Slide 33

Slide 33 text

Flexible Architecture

Slide 34

Slide 34 text

Technology/Architecture Philosophy • Avoid “undifferentiated heavy lifting” at the beginning • Resist the temptation to add complexity unnecessarily • Don’t introduce endogenous churn • De-risk by transferring that risk to your provider • Don’t be intimidated by the unknown

Slide 35

Slide 35 text

Prioritize Managed Services • Choose the highest level of abstraction available to you that gets the job done • You can always choose to de-abstract down the road, the reverse is much harder • Non-functional requirements are baked in to managed services • Operations burden is significantly reduced • Security risks are significantly (but not completely) reduced

Slide 36

Slide 36 text

Minimize Throwaway Work • Minimize, but don’t expect to eliminate re-work • PMF can be described as a point where your product is breaking under growth • Let your user feedback and desired outcomes drive changes, not technical debt • The iterative learning cycle can mean evolution over revolution

Slide 37

Slide 37 text

Make Reversible Decisions Quickly • At Amazon we call these decisions “two way doors” • What is the cost/difficulty of reversing the decision? • How do I measure the outcome? • How do revert the decision? • Be prepared to be wrong a lot initially

Slide 38

Slide 38 text

Externalize State • Separating state from logic gives you optionality, scaling, and flexibility • It also introduces new challenges and risks you need to manage

Slide 39

Slide 39 text

Externalize Authentication User management is the pinnacle of “undifferentiated heavy lifting” One of the highest risk components in the architecture Payments is another prime example of this

Slide 40

Slide 40 text

What level of abstraction are you currently or planning to build with for your MVP?

Slide 41

Slide 41 text

Building Guardrails

Slide 42

Slide 42 text

Build Guardrails, Not Gates • Includes but not limited to both security and operations • Teams should spend time solving problems that move the business ahead • Experimentation should be encouraged • Seeing the results of a change should be immediate • Time spent firefighting, waiting on people or processes, or doing rework is waste • Hiring talent is hard enough

Slide 43

Slide 43 text

Onboarding • As you grow your team the ease and safety of onboarding new developers is critical • You will have varying levels of trust • A single source of truth for identity will make your life much easier • Start documenting expected standards and processes early

Slide 44

Slide 44 text

Onboarding Consider the differences in: the ability to push code access production systems access production data

Slide 45

Slide 45 text

CI/CD • Leverage the benefits of small, fast units of deployment • If you aren’t shipping those updates, you are missing the primary benefit • Working on an MVP without CI/CD is like trying to “roll a cube” • How much CI/CD is right initially? • Does anyone really write tests?

Slide 46

Slide 46 text

Observability • Observability is what brings confidence to move quickly • How do you know the impact of your changes? • When do you need to rollback quickly? • Key components: • Metrics • Logging • Tracing

Slide 47

Slide 47 text

Synthetics • You want to find issues before your customers/users do • Continually verify your customer experience (even when you don’t have any customer traffic)

Slide 48

Slide 48 text

What level of confidence do you have in quickly making changes to your application today?

Slide 49

Slide 49 text

Surviving The Unexpected

Slide 50

Slide 50 text

• It’s easy to get tunnel vision when focused on the product • There are important ways to minimize existential risk in your environment • Don’t wait until the loss would be catastrophic • Minimize, not eliminate Every Once In Awhile, Look Up

Slide 51

Slide 51 text

• Managed services help guard against failure • They don’t protect you from accidents, errors, and malice • Centralize and automate data protection • Covers storage volumes, databases, and filesystems • Validate and test the process before you need it Managed Backups

Slide 52

Slide 52 text

• Ensuring you have visibility into your costs is critical to planning process • Understanding your costs helps you reason about feature viability • Unexpected spikes are indicators of a problem that you want to be aware of quickly • Track your AWS credit usage • Use budget alarms Cost Visibility

Slide 53

Slide 53 text

How confident are you in understanding your cloud costs, and avoiding unexpected surprises?

Slide 54

Slide 54 text

Understanding Your Users

Slide 55

Slide 55 text

• Learning what resonates with your users is a core purpose of your MVP • Determine how users are actually using your MVP • The only users that have value are active users • User metrics are different than operational metrics • Investors will expect you to be an expert on your users and their experience with your solution Validated Learning Drives MVP Iteration

Slide 56

Slide 56 text

• What are unexpected high use features? • Where do you see unexpected drop off/abandonment? • How do you need to update your hypothesis? • If you can log it, you can build metrics around it. Measuring User Activity

Slide 57

Slide 57 text

Integrating Offline Tasks

Slide 58

Slide 58 text

• Your MVP make look different to your users than from the inside • Manual processes are normal and to be expected • You can still track them to ensure good customer experience • Lay the groundwork for future automation Fake It Until You Make It

Slide 59

Slide 59 text

• You can leverage workflow co-ordination between systems • You can loop in humans with yes/no decisions via email • Applies to any back office process Tracking Manual Work with Step Functions

Slide 60

Slide 60 text

Key Takeaways

Slide 61

Slide 61 text

Speed Forgo perfection and make progress. “Move fast and make things!" Learning Every day should generate new questions, based on yesterday’s activity. Risk Reduction Have awareness of, and externalize or mitigate risk where possible.

Slide 62

Slide 62 text

“Make something people want.” Paul Graham YC

Slide 63

Slide 63 text

Please complete session survey !

Slide 64

Slide 64 text

Thank you © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Saubia Khan Solutions Architect, Startups in/saubia Nicolas David Senior Solutions Architect, Startups @nuage_ninja in/nicolasdavid